‘MDAs need to initiate gender audits’
There is the need for ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) in the country to institute gender audits to ensure that gender is effectively mainstreamed and incorporated into all activities of the state, a state official has said.
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The Director of Finance and Administration of the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, Mrs Gifty Adishetu Mahama Biyira, who made the statement, said the gender audit would provide an opportunity for the assessment of the extent to which gender was currently institutionalised in the MDAs to ensure that those who had gender units and programmes in place were strengthened, whereas those who did not have them would set up gender units immediately.
She made the statement at the end of a five-day training on ‘Gender and Organisational Change’ at the International Training Centre (ITC) of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in Turin, Italy, where she led an eight-member team from the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources and its agencies implementing the Second Ghana Land Administration Project (LAP-2) to attend the gender skills development course.
Mrs Biyira said gender mainstreaming was currently a global activity and Ghana could not be left out.
Principles of gender equality
She said it had been established that firms, institutions, companies and factories which operated on the principles of gender equality were most successful and made more turnouts in their fields of endeavour.
According to Mrs Biyira, the gender audit exercise would enable the MDAs to find out the practical and strategic gender needs of women and men to farm out the underlying policy approach for the appropriate interventions to be deployed.
In a comment, the Administrator of Stool Lands and member of the Ghanaian trainees, Mrs Christina Esi Bobobee, said it was important for all, especially men, to discourage the wrong perception that when women made progress at workplaces or in life in general, men would be the losers, stressing that men rather stood the chance of gaining immensely when women made progress in life.
Participants
The five-day training was attended by participants from across the world, including the United States, Germany, Iraq, Nepal, Nigeria, Denmark, Austria, Haiti, Pakistan, Uganda, Syria, Togo, New Caledonia, Italy and Vietnam.
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Members of the Ghanaian team were Mr Kofi Dankwa Osei, Director of the Town and Country Planning Department; Messrs Amos Wuntah Wuni, Deputy Executive Secretary, Lands Commission; John Eluerkeh and Kweku Sersah-Johnson, both of the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources.
Others were Mrs Sarah Atwi-Boasiako, Social Development and Gender Specialist of the Second Ghana Land Administration Project; and Mrs Afua Abrafi Obeng-Mireku of the Lands Commission, Kumasi.